And so to bed...

And so to bed... my regular collection of inspiring quotes posted last thing at night, collected here.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from James Hilton:

For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal —its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter.”

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from Philip Johnstone’s 1918 poem called ‘High Wood’:

In the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being ...
Madame, please,
You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotted off.
Please follow me – this way ...
the path, sir, please.
The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched,
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,
There are waste-paper-baskets at the gate.


British lieutenant John Stanley Purvis, who wrote under the pseudonym of Philip Johnson, was invalided out of the army after been wounded during the Battle of the Somme. Following the war he returned to Cranleigh School in Surrey where he had previously taught. He then took holy orders and at the age of 50 he settled in York

And so to bed... quote for tonight was written in 2009 by James Jeffrey, a thirty-two-year-old Captain serving with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, in Afghanistan

The Last Supper

A supper when we shared a table
Secure beside the bomb-blast walls
The ketchup bottle a reminder of home
Stands out from many others
I remember your humour, the polite bearing,
Explaining that insane job with zeal
Each day spending hours defusing bombs
Lying on dirt tracks, staring through sweat at wires
I sat wondering how it must feel
Almost asking the unquestionable
Might it be a matter of time with the numbers?
Perhaps you’d already thought this through.
Yet you never deterred in protecting others
All the way to where you could not turn back
From the blinding hot blast demanding sacrifice
Taking away the scruffy cheerful calm
Leaving another picture in a morose mosaic

And so to bed.. quote for tonight is from David Lloyd-George:

We cannot feed the hungry with statistics of national prosperity, or stop the pangs of famine by reciting to a man the prodigious number of cheques that pass through the clearing-house.

And so to bed... quote for tonight is from John F Kennedy:

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

G'Quon wrote, There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way.

The war we fight is not against powers and principalities – it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation.

No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.